An age-old theme permeates many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the tough people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
